We spoke to Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn's executive chairman and principal founder, as well as two former long-time executives to learn the story of how a company founded amidst the rubble of the 1990s bust managed that feat.

Besides Hoffman, these sources preferred to remain anonymous in order to keep their comments candid.

REID HOFFMAN, PRINCIPAL FOUNDER: My original idea for that was I'd be an academic. I'd write essays and books about what kinds of lives we should lead.

Then what I realized is that in order to be a professional scholar, you have to dedicate a vast majority of your career to writing esoteric books that only 50 people will understand.

It didn't interest me as much.

I came back from Oxford and decided not to be an academic. I went to Apple Computer to work on eWorld, Apple's version of America Online. Online services at its first blush.

I design, build, and improve human ecosystems. SocialNet was the first take at that. It was a way that you established a profile for yourself and what you are looking for. The most obvious primary business model for SocialNet was as a dating service.

When I started it, I didn't realize some principles about how to run a consumer Internet company. I thought we'd spend months under wraps and release the perfect product. I discovered it's most important to get your product above the noise so that people can encounter it.

Apple's AOL clone, eWorld

If you're not embarrassed by your version one release, you released it too late. There are a very small number of complete product geniuses that can labor in the dark for years and kinda pull off the sheets and say "ta-da!" and it's the right thing and everybody uses it.

I left SocialNet and was thinking about doing another startup. I had already been on the board of PayPal because Peter [Thiel] and Max [Levchin] had recruited me to the board when they started the company. They said, "Come step in as an executive and help us out with it, then go do a startup." I said fine. I did PayPal.

We sold PayPal to eBay in July 2002. As part of the deal, I negotiated that my vesting would be complete on acquisition with everyone's approval.

I went to Australia for a couple weeks to visit a friend of mine and figure out if I should take a year off. What I realized was I wouldn't have a better time in my lifetime to start an Internet company.

In Fall 2002, everyone thought the consumer Internet was done. I thought: No, the consumer Internet is just beginning. Even though there was this "we're going to have tech stores shipping dog food for free to Hawaii" craziness, the fundamental trend about how we reformulate human ecosystems is still on track.

EARLY LINKEDIN EXEC: [The day] the government eventually approved [the sale of PayPal]. [Reid] started thinking about whether he was really going to set up [LinkedIn] versus a couple of other ideas.

One of them was actually a book around professional networking – how to build your career.

Another one was this time capsule idea where you put memories away and then you unearth them like 20 years later.

There was a whole bunch of crazy ideas floating around.

LinkedIn circa 2003

HOFFMAN: Of the several ideas I had post-SocialNet, I found that transforming the way people could take control of their professional lives and easily work together to find the right people and right information was the one that was most compelling, so I cofounded LinkedIn.

[There were] four cofounders. Three of them I overlapped with at Stanford. Only one of them I actually knew at Stanford. The guy I knew was Eric Lee. Konstantin Guericke and Alan Liu were both there but I actually met them later. I met Konstantin first because we were working at competitive companies. Alan later because he was referred to me as somebody I could hire into SocialNet. The fourth guy was a guy I worked with from Fujitsu named Jean-Luc Vaillant.

[Eric and I were] both symbolic systems majors. We'd talk about symbolic systems things. We became friends later. Our most memorable event was that we both had these projects that really, really needed to be done, so we holed up in a lab at the Center for the Study of Language and basically lived there for three days. He programmed Tetris for the NEXT and I wrote a paper on the vision of frogs.

EARLY LINKEDIN EXEC: Creating a whole bunch of co-founders is a motive to get them to join in. It's an easier way to get people to join early when there's high risk. When you give one share to somebody, it doesn't go to somebody else. Reid was clearly the driving force, the founder.

HOFFMAN: The two most key people were Allen Blue and Jean-Luc. Alan knew everything from product specs to design to HTML. Jean-Luc does everything from server engineering to operations to technology strategy and planning. One of the things that makes small startups fun to work is you don't have any deadwood. Everyone pulls more than their own weight. If you don't do that you don't survive.

EARLY LINKEDIN EXEC: [LinkedIn] got funding February 2003. They got like this small little tiny office in Mountain View – literally right across the hall from Friendster.